A buyer called me a few weeks ago, genuinely annoyed — and not with me. We’d never worked together. He’d been pre-approved at his bank back in March, the letter said 120 days, and he’d done the math: he had until July. He shopped that whole time. Then he found the place, wrote the offer, and his bank told him the number no longer held.

He hadn’t run out of time. He’d bought a car in May.

By the time he reached me he’d already lost that property. What we did next was rebuild the file honestly — re-document his income, restructure how the car payment sat against his ratios, and place him with a lender that treated his situation differently. He bought two months later. But he lost the first house learning something nobody had told him:

“Pre-approved for 120 days” is a rate hold, not a promise. What’s held for 120 days is the rate. Not the amount. Not the approval. A pre-approval is only as valid as the information behind it — and your information changes.

What a pre-approval actually is

It’s a snapshot: you, on one specific day, with the income you could document that day, the credit you had that day, against the lender rules in force that day — for a generic property nobody has looked at yet.

Three of those four things can move without anyone telling you. Which is why I treat a pre-approval as a living document — something we maintain while you shop, not a receipt you file away and pull out in July.

Four things that make it stale long before day 120

1. New debt. The big one, and almost always innocent. A car loan. A credit line for the reno you’re planning after you move in. Financing the furniture. A $600 monthly payment can quietly remove roughly $80,000–$100,000 of buying power, because lenders don’t look at your income — they look at what’s left of it. Nobody in that March story did anything reckless. He bought a car, and no one had told him to call first.

2. A job change — even a good one. “I got a raise” sounds like it can only help. It depends entirely on structure. Salary to commission, employee to contractor, base to bonus-heavy — each can reduce what a lender will count, even when the deposit hitting your account is bigger. I’ve had someone come to me after a promotion cost them their approval elsewhere: two years of salaried history had become four months of self-employment. We got it done, but with a different lender and a different set of documents than the one that turned them down.

3. Credit moved. A missed payment, a balance run up near its limit, a run of new applications. Utilization matters more than people expect — carrying a card close to its limit can drag a score down even when every payment is on time.

4. The lender changed the rules — or changed their mind. This one was never yours to control. Earlier this summer someone came to me after his bank retracted an offer he’d already been given. Nothing about him had changed. Their appetite had. We placed him elsewhere at a comparable rate, and the only real cost was three weeks of stress he shouldn’t have had to carry. Guidelines, stress-test math, and how a lender treats a given income type all shift — and none of it gets announced to you.

The part nobody mentions: the property has to qualify too

This is where I see the most heartbreak, and it has nothing to do with your file.

Your income can be perfect, your credit spotless, your down payment sitting in the account — and the deal can still die because of the property. Leased land. Co-ops. Live/work units. Very small square footage. Pre-construction with a long closing. Condo fees and taxes high enough to eat the room in your ratios.

I have a file on my desk right now that came to me after two major banks declined it — and neither of them declined her. They declined the land. It’s a leasehold property. She qualifies comfortably; the tenure doesn’t fit their policy. We’re now working it with lenders who actually lend on leasehold, which is a conversation that should have happened before she ever wrote an offer.

Condo fees deserve their own warning too. A $700,000 target with $1,100 monthly fees is not the same purchase as $700,000 with $450 fees. Same number on the listing, materially different mortgage.

So the sequence I ask for is simple: pre-qualify the property before you write the offer. Send me the listing. It takes minutes and it’s the cheapest insurance in this entire process.

And a verbal pre-approval isn’t a pre-approval

Someone at a bank said a number on the phone. No documents reviewed, no income verified, nothing submitted.

I met a buyer who was about to bid on a $600,000 property on exactly that basis — confident, because a number had been said out loud. That’s not an approval, that’s an estimate with good manners. We caught it in time, ran the real numbers, and the actual figure was lower than what he’d been told. He bid within his real budget instead of finding out on closing.

One more that catches good earners off guard

Sold a rental property? That income is gone.

The sale often makes the tax return look stronger — but a lender won’t count income from a property you no longer own. I’ve had people arrive with a much healthier-looking return and less borrowing power than the year before. Nothing went wrong. The math just changed, and the letter in their drawer hadn’t caught up.

What to do instead

• Refresh when your situation changes, not when the clock runs out. New job, new debt, new deposit, new plan — that’s the trigger. Not day 119.
• Call before you sign anything with a monthly payment. A car, a lease, a credit line. One text beforehand is free. Afterwards it’s a re-qualification.
• Send the listing before the offer. Property first, then price.
• Keep a financing condition when the market allows it. Sometimes it doesn’t. When it does, take it.
• Don’t assume a four-month-old letter is still true. Nothing about you was frozen in place while you shopped.

Bottom line

The 120 days isn’t the problem. Almost nobody’s pre-approval fails because a date passed — it fails because the information underneath it moved and nobody re-checked.

So don’t treat your pre-approval like a coupon with an expiry date. Treat it like something that gets maintained while you shop. And if you’re holding a pre-approval from somewhere else and anything has shifted since you got it — or you just want to know whether your number still holds — send it over. That check costs you nothing, and it’s a much better conversation to have before offer night than after.

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